Man. There's a house for rent over on the other side of this housing estate. It's 4 bedrooms with two reception rooms, a quite good kitchen with a surprising number of cupboards, and a fairly wonderful, sizeable garden with a shaded sitting area. The whole of it has got the most gorgeous view (it overlooks this and this and this, for example). It's closer to the train station, and will be closer yet when the new footpath opens up from literally twenty steps away from the front door over the hill and down toward the station. It's easily the most beautiful place we've ever contemplated renting. It's also almost half again what we're paying in rent currently, and we cannot decide what to do.

There are several things feeding into trying to make a decision. One is that our landlord's announced her intention to sell the house we're renting when our current lease is up (in September). She gave us what amounts to the right of first refusal on the house; we can buy it if we want to (and if we could come up with the money). It's a fine 3 bedroom house, but if it were mine I would want to put a lot of work into it. That would be okay, but we're not *entirely* sure we want to buy a house anyway, because it looks like the rest of the family is moving to Bray, and Ted's new job is with a hotel chain that has hotels in the Dublin area, at least, so maybe in a few years we'll want to move up there, and buying a house appears to be a great deal of work (and expense) here, so we don't know that we want to do it twice. Another is that financially this is an absolute crap time to move, because we're waiting for me to get paid (have I written a post about the vagueries of finances as a writer? should I do that?), but of course if we wait very long somebody else is going to snatch it up. Another is that work-wise this is an absolute crap time to move, since I have a book due in six weeks, but hey, that didn't stop me from selling a house and moving to the other side of the planet a couple years ago, right?

The somewhat aggravating thing is that if we were buying that place, we'd absolutely jump on a mortgage of the size the monthly rent is. But then, of course, we'd be buying it, and would be free to do what we wanted with it (the decor is very nicely appointed, but it's not what I'd put in my house), and that's unquestionably the bitch about renting.

So on the one hand, logic dictates that it would not be a good move to make, but on the other hand, if we're going to be renting for a while, living somewhere that beautiful would just rock.